England will look to lock a place in the semifinals of the ICC Champions Trophy 2013 when they take on Sri Lanka.

After Wednesday's match between Australia and New Zealand was rained off, England have moved into pole position in Group A and can guarantee themselves a place in the semifinals with a win over Sri Lanka at The Oval Thursday.

"I think -- we were just discussing in the change room before practice how much -- we've enjoyed this tournament, in terms of every time you watch the TV, the game, you know there's something really important on in that game," England skipper Alastair Cook said.

"As players you feel that. You feel every time you play in this tournament so far. We've only played one but we know how important it is to have a good start, and now that we've had a good start we know how important this game is.

"If you make mistakes you get punished quite quickly for them. I think the players like that, and I think it's been very refreshing this tournament."

Sri Lanka, who lost to New Zealand in their first game, will bank on their yorker machine Lasith Malinga to make inroads into the England batting lineup and Cook acknowledged the danger that the fast bowler poses.

"Clearly he's obviously a dangerous man for Sri Lanka," he said. "He's a mighty fine bowler and a very elite bowler in terms of he's got a very different technique or bowling action than you come across very often.

"Most of us have faced him before. It does take a little bit of time to get used to his action, so we're trying to obviously help pass on some experience facing him before as a side.

"Of course he's tricky. He's a very good bowler, and he's a major part of their success. So if we can play him well as a batting unit, it will really put Sri Lanka under some pressure."

While Sri Lanka have looked a good bowling unit, their batting is a bit of a concern and captain Angelo Mathews has asked his batsmen to step up to the plate against England at The Oval.

"I think the whole batting unit has to take responsibility," Mathews said. "The whole batting unit when it comes to the top seven especially, we need to take responsibility on this because we can't really expect the bowlers to score runs for us.

"The bowlers, if we actually get to 250, 240, the bowlers will actually do the job for us. More often than not they have done the job for us, but I think it's pretty hard to ask the bowlers, as well. We as batters need to take responsibility on our batting."